California Air Is Cleaner, but Troubles Remain

By FELICITY BARRINGER

Published: August 3, 2005

On many days, a hiker on the Temescal Ridge trail above the Pacific Ocean, 30 to 50 miles west of the San Gabriel Mountains, can trace the snowy ridges and the thin, brown lines of canyons with the naked eye. Three decades ago, an entire summer could pass before homeowners just five miles from the mountains could see the peaks.

Kyle Eden, a varsity tennis player in Glendora High School below the San Gabriels, has never had a match called for smog, as his father, Rudy, did in the 1970's.

Bob Wyman, a lawyer, no longer pants for air after running as he did in his childhood.

Visitors like Leon Billings, who shaped the Clean Air Act as a senior Senate staff member, do not have to pull off the freeways and wait for their eyes to stop tearing.

''Smog had a palpable impact on our daily lives,'' Mr. Wyman said. ''I'm 51. I'm not sure how conscious most people are of this.''

In the last half-century, the urgent need to scrub clean the filthiest air in the country has reshaped the region's politics, turned obscure agencies into regulatory behemoths and made Los Angeles an international leader in its hard-won expertise.

But for all this achievement, success -- consistently healthy air for all 16 million Southern Californians -- remains out of reach.

The ozone pollution is improving but the region remains, along with Houston and the San Joaquin Valley in Central California, one of the worst three in the nation.

And the authorities have far less power to control another type of air pollution, one just as harmful as ozone, if not more so.

Hidden from hikers in Topanga State Park by the low hills of the Palos Verdes Peninsula are the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The hub of a ravenous American appetite for cheap Asian goods, the ports are also a concentrated source of diesel pollutants spewing from the ships, locomotives and lines of idling trucks.

The tiny exhaust particles, just one twenty-eighth the width of the average human hair, get deep inside lungs and have been newly linked to cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Much of what Los Angeles has achieved has been accomplished by strict state regulations in tandem with the federal mandates of the Clean Air Act of 1970. With continuing pressure from the Bush administration for changes in the act, this place whose name was once synonymous with filthy air is perhaps the best place to measure what the Clean Air Act has accomplished -- and what remains undone.

The Los Angeles narrative has parallels around the country. In the Ohio River Valley, the steel industry has shriveled, but electric utilities have become a dominant polluter. Along the western shores of the Gulf of Mexico, the chemical industry stands in the forefront. In California, the biggest issue is emissions from cars, trucks, trains and ships.

The four counties usually visible from the ocean-hugging slopes above Santa Monica have been to the clean air struggle what the Deep South was to the civil rights movement.

It was not a folk-song-ready revolution. Its epic figures are biochemists and engineers, known for precision, not charisma. Its battlefields, the insides of engines. Its foot soldiers, bureaucracies with forgettable names but memorable accomplishments, like setting emission standards that put catalytic converters in California cars in 1975, two years ahead of the rest of the nation.

California's problem today, however, is that the state has little clear legal authority at the ports, where cargo volume is projected to triple by 2030. ''A great deal of work still needs to be done,'' said Michael H. Scheible, deputy executive officer of the California Air Resources Board. ''And we don't have another automobile out there, something that has big emissions and that we have full authority to control.''

Pollution Fight Begins

In 1955, downtown Los Angeles experienced the nation's worst-ever prolonged ozone pollution: on one day the hourly average levels of choking ozone were six times the maximum allowable rate under current federal standards.

The source had been pinpointed a couple of years earlier, by Arie Haagen-Smit, a scientist at the California Institute of Technology. A plant biologist, Dr. Haagen-Smit had been studying the organic basis of pineapples' scent, using ozone as a tool, when, as his wife later told a Caltech historian, a scientist heading the area's first air pollution control agency asked him to try to figure out where smog came from.

In a study quickly ridiculed by scientists financed by the auto industry, Dr. Haagen-Smit laid out the method by which hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen, rising from car tailpipes into Southern California's persistent sunlight, were cooked into photochemical smog. The major component is ozone created through this chemical reaction.

Dr. Haagen-Smit intended to return to his pineapples, but after he heard his work disparaged in a Caltech lecture hall, he devoted himself to pollution science, eventually becoming the first head of the statewide Air Resources Board.

In laying out the formula for what ailed Los Angeles, Dr. Haagen-Smit had fingered its principal sources: cars and oil refineries. And as more became known about these and other causes of pollution, lawmakers began to focus on controlling them.

Fifteen years after Los Angeles's most breathless summer, Congress passed the Clean Air Act of 1970, which took many of its core concepts from California.